Obama Calls Tea Partiers 'Tea-Baggers'

Watch your mouth, Mr. President! Writing in ABC's "Political Punch,"
Senior White House correspondent Jake
Tapper reports that despite his campaign promise of a post-partisan
era, even Barack Obama isn't above occasional name-calling. Reading through Jonathan Alter's new book on
President Obama's first year, "The
Promise: President Obama, Year One," Tapper comes across a November
30, 2009 interview in which Obama declared that the unanimous vote of
House Republicans against the stimulus bills "set the tenor for the
whole year ... That helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that
whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda
for the Republicans." Obama's use of the term "tea-bagger," often
deployed mockingly by news outlets, surprises Tapper. "Three
days after he decried the lack of civility in American politics,
President Obama is quoted in a new book about his presidency referring
to the Tea Party movement using a derogatory term with sexual
connotations," he reports.

Naturally, conservative pundits are irate.
"Really. How many more selective civility police lectures can we take
from this vulgarity-clogged White House?" writes Michelle
Malkin. "Obama may be the most thin-skinned President we've ever
had. It'll be funny to see him apologize for his crude, offensive, and
juvenile language when this book officially comes out," declares Ian
Lazaran at Conservatives 4 Palin.

But amidst the knee-jerk
outrage from some on the right, a few journalists have turned a critical eye
to Tapper's report. This is nothing new, notes Dave
Weigel at the Washington Post, pointing to a sneak
peak of Alter's book by Gabriel Sherman in March that highlighted one of Alter's "more
freewheeling interviews" with Obama:

Sherman's excerpt didn't get
a lot of attention ... But today Americans for Tax Reform pounced
on the excerpt with a news release and a quote from its president
Grover Norquist. Jake Tapper of ABC News -- armed with a news hook about
the president calling
for "civility" in politics -- pounced. And now the story lives on.

Slow
the process down and you can see the tea party movement doing what Tom
Cruise did in the recent "South Park" two-parter
that has so worried Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.). Namely, it's defining
as a slur, or as hate speech, a term that snarky TV hosts turned into
popular parlance -- it sounds less clumsy than "tea partyers." In
responding, tea partyers strike a pose not altogether different from
civil rights groups criticizing politicians or media figures for
stumbling over racial slurs.

Taking that analogy a step further, though from a different perspective, Adam Serwer of the American Prospect asks: "How long before someone compares
POTUS using 'teabagger' term to using n-word? Taking bets..."